How Hamilton Sets the Stage for the Future of History

Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton with a cast composed almost entirely of people of color, is finally publicly available, in part. The cast recording, which presents nearly the entire production unabridged, is streaming on NPR. While there are reasons to avoid the audio if you want to hold out for the full experience, there’s at least one perspective from which everyone can now engage with Hamilton and wonder whether something with its premise "works"—which is to say, they can ask the absolute wrong question.

Of course Hamilton works. It has strong characters, who are ably given life even without being able to see their performances. The music is catchy, thoughtful, and references several different American traditions. It’s fun as hell, and also sometimes makes you want to cry (or is that just me?). So rather than repeatedly claim that Hamilton’s success is improbable, maybe we should ask why it seems strange at all.

A "likely" musical about Alexander Hamilton would probably have been closer to a traditional, stiff, biopic-like affair. Perhaps it would have starred Hugh Jackman. It would have been bad. Critical reaction to Hamilton isn’t a surprise because there’s something "objectively" odd or off about a hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton—it’s because we approach the study and exploration of history, even through art, with assumptions that all too often render the players opaque and the events stale.

People of the past are fundamentally unknowable to us, to an uncomfortable extent—their lives were structured differently, shaped by different concerns and needs and conceptual structures. But at the very least, it seems safe to say they didn’t act like they were fulfilling a bad narrative arc written by some dude. The proto-mythic version of history—that George Washington could not tell a lie, Thomas Jefferson was a full-on hero, and everything they did worked out for the best—is taught to, and makes sense for, children. But it’s not appropriate for engaged adults, who should be able to understand that people in the past were still people, who, like us, can be engaged from a variety of perspectives and through a number of lenses.

A part of the genius of Hamilton is that it renders the Founding Fathers—Unknowable Historical Men if ever there were any—understandable, at least from one angle. When Hamilton meets his first New York friends at a tavern, it’s not a fated gathering of titanic figures, it’s a group of idealistic, passionate young men talking shit over beer. When the meetings of George Washington’s cabinet become freestyle rap battles, they cease to be stuffy debates from a textbook, and instead become verbally dextrous, aggressive dick-measuring contests with higher stakes. When the dandyish King George struts around complaining about his lost colonies as if they were a favorite toy (or a lover), he’s a modern archetype that provides a prism for the historical "King George."

Rendering history present and new is hard, but it’s not impossible. Take "The Knick", a period drama about medicine in the early 20th century. It should be boring and unhelpful for any purpose other than a literal (and wrong) imagining of what life was like, but Steven Soderbergh’s frenzied, claustrophobic direction and Cliff Martinez’s pulsing, ominous, electronic score force the viewer into a sense of immediacy, of forgetting that the events depicted have both already happened and never happened. Both pieces of art effectively translate the past, rendering history legible to the current observer.

There need to be a lot more rap musicals—or if not rap musicals, then at least more creative approaches to history that render it present. And if we’re going to dig things up and try to understand them from our own vantage point, we could do worse than to start with the character perhaps most poorly served by Hamilton’s approach to history: Aaron Burr.

The musical’s Burr (given voice by Leslie Odom, Jr.) is, essentially, the Salieri to Hamilton’s Mozart, bemoaning the fact that his high station has done nothing to help him keep up with his intellectually voracious, magnetic friend and rival. Miranda’s Burr is apologetic, and it’s possible the man was—but, more importantly, he also tried to provoke a rebellion against Spanish rule in parts of Mexico, ostensibly so that he could form an independent country. Yes, Aaron Burr tried to become—wait for it—the King of Mexico, and he was the center of America’s first major treason trial. That is nuts, and deserves its own dramatization.

Which is to say that history is full of weird stuff that doesn’t fit the narrative we tend to receive, and musical tools and alternate perspectives are helpful in giving us new ways of grappling with real, complicated people. At the very least, we could give the musical treatment to the guy who winds up as the butt of all the jokes in Hamilton.